Israel played key role in failed intelligence assessment before Iraq war
04-12-2003, 08:56
The mounting pressure inside the US and Britain for investigations into the intelligence failure prior to the war against Iraq "forgets there was a third senior partner to the assessment (that Saddam had WMD and the ability to deliver them) - and that third partner was Israel," a new report from Israel's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, written by Brig. Gen. (res.) Shlomo Brum, a former deputy commander of the Israeli Army's Planning Branch, said.
It appears Israel not only provided false intelligence to other Western intelligence agencies, but also played a crucial factor in pushing the US and its allies into launching a war against Saddam Hussein and his regime.
"Israeli intelligence was a full partner to the picture
presented by US and British intelligence about Iraq's
non-conventional capabilities ... (and) the failures in the
war in Iraq point to inherent failures and weaknesses of
Israeli intelligence and decision makers. Similar
failures could take place in the future if the issue is not fully researched, and the proper conclusions reached," Brum's report said.
In addition, he wrote that the exaggerated assessments regarding Baghdad's capabilities damaged public trust in the national assessors and decision makers. The result was the public ignoring the instructions it was given and a financial cost still not fully calculated.
"Before the war the defense establishment did not spare any cost to deal with non-existent threats or threats with zero possibility of actualization," he wrote.
There was also damage to Israel's foreign relations, he added. "Foreign intelligence agencies could lose their faith in the intelligence assessments Israel provides, and
foreign countries could suspect that Israel is providing false information meant to convince that foreign country to accept Israel's political positions."
The exaggerated pre-war assessments, he added, could result "in a potential enemy concluding that if Israel as so terrified by such a marginal threat, it must have good
reasons to be so scared."
Prior to the war, Israeli intelligence had to choose between the possibility that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and continued to develop them or the UN inspectors had indeed managed to disarm Iraq of those weapons and long-range missiles. "Israeli intelligence adopted the first choice without ever showing signs of any doubt."
He said that the reason was a "dogmatic concept. The intelligence agencies were taken over by a mono-dimensional view of Saddam that fundamentally described him as the embodiment of evil, a man in the grip of an obsession to develop weapons of mass destruction to harm
Israel and others, without any other considerations ... there was absolute indifference to the complexity of
considerations that a leader like Saddam Hussein must have."
Brum wrote there was reason to believe that survival was Saddam's main goal "and such an assessment should have led to the conclusion that after 1991 developing weapons of mass destruction could become threatening to his survival."
The lack of skepticism about the concept proves there are inherent problems in the intelligence assessment methodologies used prior to the war on Iraq; Brum wrote, pointing to two key problems: exaggerated intelligence concerns, the roots of which are in the October 1973 war, and a lack of professionalism.
As a result of the 1973 War, Israeli intelligence officials prefer to predict the worst possible scenario, so if they are proven right, they come out as "heroes", and if they are proven wrong, everyone is so relieved that they forget the faulty assessment.
The lack of professionalism, conveyed Brum is in the act that Israel's national assessment was that it was threatened by Iraqi missiles, while its working assumption was that Iraq had very few long range missiles and launchers. (Al |
